Multimedia Banner Ad on Yandex.Music

Internet, September 6, 2011. Yandex offers its advertising clients a new format for their ads. The new, one-of-a-kind multimedia banner ad allows advertisers to maximize their product’s presence and to solve virtually any creative task. It was designed specifically for running on Yandex.Music, the company’s music search and streaming service.

The new banner ad has a unique format. It is an ultra large (400х1200 pixels) advertisement taking up almost one-third of computer screen and employing various media including photo, video, text and Flash. It consists of three segments, each containing a special type of information. Advertisers can use a video gallery, a flash video and text description in different sections of one and the same ad. This banner ad looks like a mini promo site displayed right on Yandex.Music’s front page. At the same time, it is not intrusive, as visitors to the service do not use the whole screen space for searching or streaming music anyway.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the new advertising format, Yandex, together with the audience measurement company Nielsen and a group of advertisers, studied user audience exposed to the new banner ad. Over 35 companies including Disney, BMW, Orbit, Hewlett-Packard and Beeline had run their ads in the new format on Yandex.Music for several weeks. Placement efficiency turned out to be very high with the average CTR reaching 1.45% and the best CTR going up to 5.04%. According to Nielsen’s results, the increase in both brand recognition and ad recognition averaged to 15%. Nielsen’s efficiency study of advertising campaigns on Yandex.Music is available at advertising.yandex.ru/advertiser/research/nielsen.xml. To see the most successful ads, visit music.yandex.ru/adv.

“Yandex.Music is a very special project, in a way. It is world's first, undoubtedly mass-user service offering free, licensed music for quality streaming. Now, we are starting to monetize this service using a new advertising solution, which, at the time, does not have any competing products either in terms of format or in terms of efficiency. Our partnership model with copyright holders is not conventional, either. In contrast to traditional online music services, rather than sharing the sales revenues with our partners, we are planning to share with them our advertising revenues. We are positive that in the current market copyright holders can generate larger bottom-line revenue from advertising than from selling content," says Alexei Tretiakov, Chief Sales Officer at Yandex.

The multimedia banner ad on Yandex.Music runs only in Russia and is available for purchase on a pay-per-session basis. Users searching for music or steaming it right on the service’s front page are continually exposed to one and the same advertisement for at least as long as 10 minutes. To read more about the terms and conditions of multimedia banner ad placement on Yandex.Music, please visit this page advertising.yandex.ru/price/media/music.xml.

Nielsen conducted their study of 1,000 participants in June 2011. The sample included 500 people who visited Yandex.Music during advertising campaigns and 500 people that did not visit the service during this period. Each group in the sample was balanced in gender, age and income to represent the Russian internet audience.

Contact:
Media Relations
Vladimir Isaev, Ochir Mandzhikov
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com